BERKELEY –
University Medal finalist Brian Loo took a big risk
in his essay applying for the campus's top award.
The fifth-year Arabic and English double major mentioned
not a single one of his many inspiring
public-service and extracurricular activities:
serving as president of UC Berkeley's Model United
Nations, peer counselor, immigrant-aid volunteer,
and scholarship founder.

Instead, he chose to describe the "academic
theories and personal epiphanies that form the backbone
of my worldview." His essay thus takes readers
on a journey from Benedict Anderson's book "Imagined
Communities," through Edward Said's seminal "Orientalism" and
Carl Rogers's model of empathetic counseling, to
finish with a literary theory that if "reality
is unfiltered chaos" — filtered differently
by each person — then literature is a joint
effort between author and reader to make order from
that chaos.

This intellectual high-wire act, though unusual
by University Medal standards, is entirely in character
for Loo. In both classes he took with Janet Adelman, "he
distinguished himself particularly by the quality
of his papers, which were uniformly bold and wide-ranging
in their thought … and
beautifully argued," wrote the professor
and chair of the English department in a letter
recommending him for the Medal.

The
University Medal
Established in 1871 by California Governor Henry
Huntly Haight, the University Medal honors UC
Berkeley's most distinguished graduating senior.
Three to five students are also named as finalists.

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At heart, Loo is an idealist — one who believes that nationality,
religion, and culture are often masks that
prevent people from recognizing others as both unique
individuals and human beings with the same basic
needs and rights as themselves. And although in simplified
form this might sound a lot like the lyrics to John
Lennon's song "Imagine," Loo is not just
thinking about this philosophy, he is trying to figure
how to live it.

Growing up in Redlands, California, an hour east
of Los Angeles "in the smog dumpster," as
he cheerfully puts it, Loo was as self-involved as
any typical adolescent. Although he was very active
in speech and debate, developing a taste for public
speaking that he would satisfy later at Berkeley's
Model United Nations, he didn't pay much attention
to world events. That is, until the middle of his
senior year in high school, when Loo's half-Lebanese
friend started crying over Israel's announcement
that it was going to bomb Lebanon.

"I realized there was this whole world out
there that I wasn't even aware of," Loo says.
He began to learn about the Middle East, and enrolled
in an elementary Arabic language class for his first
semester of school at UC Berkeley.

Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001. Loo was stunned, disturbed by all the Middle
Eastern stereotypes and talk of war in the news.
He tried — and failed — to organize a
sit-in for peace, and joined the memorials and protests
on Sproul Plaza. And he founded a scholarship, "Plans
for Peace," at his old high school in Redlands.
The scholarship would give $600 to the best research
paper, chosen by a community committee, about a peaceful
solution to any international conflict of the student's
choosing.

"I was just a little freshman at a big university,
but I thought that everyone should be doing something,
and this is what I can do," says Loo. "I
know an essay is not going to change the world, but
it's a gesture toward what I think will help: for
people to learn to think about the international
community in terms of ourselves."

Loo tapped local businesses for donations for "Plans
for Peace," but ended up funding most of it
himself, by two summers' worth of working the midnight
shift doing grocery inventory. (He discontinued the
scholarship after 2004.)

He also threw himself into Model United Nations,
which simulates the workings of the United Nations
through meetings and national conferences that include,
for example, mock Security Council meetings, debating
real international issues like the Israel-Palestine
problem, and even occasionally expands to include
the participation of counterparts like NATO. In his
five-year involvement, Loo served at times as chief
of staff, deputy secretary general, and president
of the 60-student Berkeley chapter, helping to run
the annual conference of more than 400 participants
from around the globe.

As president, "I was nominally in charge of
everything and at the same time, really in charge
of nothing," he laughs. "It suited me well.
I really enjoy making people cooperate."

'It's a big leap from
high school to Berkeley. You have to look out for
yourself and find people who will help you.'

-Brian Loo

Loo played a similar supervisory role as the coordinator
of the Student to Student Peer Counseling (SSPC)
program, which he joined as a sophomore. His involvement "began
with randomness, as most things do with me":
a friend in the dorms was a SSPC counselor and invited
him to come along. Loo, who had known someone in
high school who attempted suicide, was immediately
interested.

SSPC uses the Rogerian model for therapy, which
as Loo explained in his essay is based on the belief
that truly knowing another person's complex psychological
and emotional makeup is impossible, and a counselor
should simply, by conveying unconditional empathy,
help clients explore their own feelings and ideas
about their problems. Essentially, for roughly seven
hours a week, Loo makes himself available to listen
to his fellow students.

"Just being there for someone can make a huge
difference at a large university, where it's all
too easy for people to fall through the cracks," he
says.

That said, Loo also believes students need to take
an active role in their Berkeley experience. "Go
after what interests you. Here, you can't just sit
back and wait for things to happen," he says
when asked what advice he would give to freshmen. "You
can't just write a good paper and expect to get a
recommendation letter from a professor later — you
have to go to office hours. It's a big leap from
high school to Berkeley. You have to look out for
yourself and find people who will help you."

Despite his demanding double major and his many extracurricular activities — he
also volunteered at the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant,
helping immigrants with work and residency-related
applications — Loo managed
to maintain a 3.975 grade point average. He did take
the fall 2003 semester off entirely, saying he was "totally burnt out" after
spending the summer of 2003 in Lebanon, studying
advanced Arabic at the American University in Beirut.
His parents were supportive this break, but
they said he would have to pay his own bills; Loo
got a job at a local bookstore and spent the semester
recharging.

Although he loved his time in Beirut — "it
was such a beautiful city, and people were so warm
and welcoming" — he ended up studying
10 to 12 hours per day, which left very little time
for travel. Loo made one trip out of Lebanon, to
Damascus. He also didn't get to socialize much, but
he enjoyed the shock that his language abilities
inspired in the Lebanese. "They're not used
to seeing many Chinese-looking people, and I was
the first many had met who could speak Arabic."

By learning to speak, read, and write this incredibly
difficult language — Loo pens poetry
and fiction in both Arabic and English — he
hopes to serve as an ambassador between American
and Arab cultures, dispelling stereotypes on both
sides. After graduation, he hopes to attend one of
the State Department's summer language schools in
either Yemen and Lebanon, followed by a year-long
intensive language study in Qatar or Egypt. It all
depends on which scholarships and fellowships come
through.

And looking even further into the future, he isn't
sure exactly what he'll do. "I'd like to volunteer — or
work for subsistence pay — for a humanitarian
aid group or nongovernmental organization in the
Middle East, teaching English in a Palestinian refugee
camp, for example. Then I'll probably come back to
the States for graduate school, because that's what
everyone does," he laughs. "I'm hoping
I'll have it all figured it out by then."

At least one of his professors has confidence that
he will. "I think that Brian's work will always
make a difference, and that we will be very glad
to claim him as one of ours," wrote Adelman.